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Gordon Senior

Gordon Senior

Artist Statement

Gordon Senior lives and works in the Central Valley of California, and during the summer months close to the North Sea in Norfolk England. His work is concerned with the cultural differences he encounters in these two places and he addresses, within his sculpture and drawings, our loss of relationship with our surrounding landscape. There is within his work a dialogue about nature and mankind. Senior is preoccupied with the relationships between humans, animals and birds, and the earth we all live on. There is a sense that humans once belonged to the earth, but have progressively been losing this belonging, turning us into urbanized displaced landscape tourists.

“Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, and seasons, you cannot leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments, saying, I am here. You are part of me.” Ben Logan, The Land Remembers.

In a recent review of Senior’s work Professor David Olivant wrote:

“Senior has thus transformed uncertainty into invention and has charted the process in his recent series of object groups. In some he converts what is natural to his past into the form of his present and in others he transposes the objects of his present environment into a language of nostalgia for his former existence. Towers is a monument that embodies both of these practices. The eight structures of which it consists loosely conform to the skyscraper format, but through transpositions of materials and scale and utility they stand as testaments to a re-jigged nostalgia, a hybrid of memory and innovation in which the artist can cast the old forms into new molds. It is the signal achievement of Senior’s recent work to have invigorated the tendency to nostalgia in his earlier work, by exploiting the necessity of his current cultural alienation, and thus creating a potent meditation on the nature of memory as well as a subtle critique of multiculturalism.”